Our Weekly Theme: GRIT!!!
Can you believe we made it to May? What a challenging year we have all lived through! But we made it to May!!! Hooray for us!!!
I can’t think of a more appropriate word to describe what it took to arrive at May’s doorstep than to explore the meaning of GRIT!
It took GRIT to plunge ahead at the beginning of the school year full of unknowns. It took GRIT to persevere through: -the loss of normalcy and security -loss of jobs -loss of meeting our friends out and about for our own self care -anxiety of what’s next -fear of our loved ones becoming ill -organizing child care and how to “do school” when we were forced into distance learning which was totally unknown territory for everyone. It took GRIT to adhere to the mandates and social distancing guidelines to keep ourselves and loved ones as safe as possible. PHEW!!! But we did it and we couldn’t have...without GRIT!
You can’t have GRIT without courage. Someone described courage as being afraid but acting and doing the right thing anyway. Eleanor Roosevelt once said to “do something that scares you everyday.” I think she was onto something about GRIT.
People who have GRIT persevere through all the twists and turns. They don’t give up. They have a crystal clear long term goal at the center of their mind and they aren’t afraid of failure. They take risks and seem to revel in the lessons failure teaches them so they can do it better next time.
Children develop GRIT by learning from their success as well as by learning the hard way... about what doesn’t work. But if children don’t do the work, they won’t learn the lesson. Children can’t develop GRIT if someone else does for them.
Angela Duckworth, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, suggests that GRIT is a strong predictor of success and ability to reach one’s goals.
Duckworth’s research on grit has shown that…
West Point cadets who scored highest on the Grit Test were 60% more likely to succeed than their peers.
Ivy League undergraduate students who had more grit also had higher GPAs than their peers — even though they had lower SAT scores and weren’t as “smart.”
When comparing two people who are the same age but have different levels of education, grit (and not intelligence) more accurately predicts which one will be better educated.
Competitors in the National Spelling Bee outperform their peers not because of IQ, but because of their grit and commitment to more consistent practice. (taken from Grit: A Complete Guide on Being Mentally Tough)
GRIT is what happens when you lose your motivation and aren’t “feelin it.” You push through it and continue on to do what needs to be done.
We pushed through the difficult times this year and we got here together. Some of it wasn’t pretty at all but we used GRIT to persevere.
We have one month left to finish strong. We can do this! We’ve already done some tough stuff this year. We rolled our sleeves up and got into the nitty gritty. We got our hands dirty. We made some mistakes and we learned a whole bunch. And we are stronger for it all. We made it to May! Hooray for us!!!